“Son of a bitch!” Howard Frank said reverently. “We’ve got him!”
Reinhard Heydrich had served in the Navy before the war-till he left it abruptly after not marrying the senior officer’s daughter he’d seduced. He’d flown combat missions over Poland and the Soviet Union. The only experience he had as a foot soldier was getting away from the Ivans after his 109 crash-landed between their lines and the Germans’.
Squelching through a swamp and ducking down into the mud and the water plants wasn’t his idea of fun. But Hans Klein had the perfect spur for him: “Do you want the fucking Amis to catch you, sir?”
“Now that you mention it, no,” Heydrich admitted.
“Well, then, don’t stand straight up and down like a heron looking for frogs. Get down here with me,” Klein said. He hadn’t had much ground combat experience himself-certainly none since he became Heydrich’s driver. But he sure talked like somebody who knew what he was talking about.
“If you’d been able to fix the Kubelwagen when it broke down for real-” Heydrich began peevishly.
But that didn’t wash, either. The Oberscharfuhrer let out a derisive snort. “Ja, doch, then what? I’ll tell you what…sir. I’d’ve driven us straight into a Yankee ambush, that’s what, and they’d’ve filled both of us full of holes.”
Again, he was altogether too likely to be right. That made Heydrich love him no better when freezing water filled his shoe…again. Maybe infantrymen really were the heroes of the war, even if pilots and panzer commanders got more ink from Goebbels. Infantrymen put up with more shit-no possible doubt about that.
The Kubelwagen had flatulently expired about ten kilometers outside of Nuremberg. The horrible noises it made told Klein he didn’t have the tools to fix it. They started off for a farmhouse they could see a couple of kilometers off the road. Maybe the farmer would have the tools. If he didn’t…If he didn’t, they would think of something else, that was all.
They’d just trudged into a grove of apple trees not far from the farmhouse when Klein looked back over his shoulder and said, “Mm, Herr Reichsprotektor, I think maybe we don’t want to go back no matter what.”
“Are you out of your-?” Heydrich had begun. Then he’d looked over his shoulder, too. American jeeps and an armored car and U.S. soldiers in their pot helmets and ugly greenish khaki uniforms swarmed around the dead Kubelwagen. When Heydrich turned to say as much to Klein, Klein wasn’t there. He was down on the ground, and reaching out to tug urgently at Heydrich’s trouser leg. Heydrich needed a second to get it, which proved him no infantryman. Then he hit the dirt, too.
They crawled away from the car that had chosen such an opportune moment to crap out. No bullets chased them, so the Amis hadn’t spotted them before they went down.
“Have they got dogs?” Klein whispered as they slithered away.
“I don’t think so. I didn’t see any,” Heydrich replied, also in a low voice. Low voice or not, he had trouble hiding his scorn. The Russians would have had dogs. The Russians, damn them, were serious about this twilight battle. The Americans didn’t seem to be. They thought his men annoyances, nuisances. They wanted everything peaceful and easy and smooth. Well, you didn’t always get what you wanted, even if you were an Ami.
After a while, Klein found another question: “Do you know of any bunkers around here?”
A map formed inside Heydrich’s mind. He had an excellent, even outstanding, memory and a knack for visualization. After a moment, he nodded. “Ja. There’s one maybe three kilometers east of here.”
“Can you find it? Shall we go there?”
“I can find it,” Heydrich said confidently: what he promised, he could deliver. The other half of Klein’s question wasn’t so easy to answer. After some thought, the Reichsprotektor said, “I’d rather not go to ground if I can help it. If they track us to the bunker, we’re trapped like a badger inside its sett.”
“Well, yes,” Klein returned, also after a pause to think. “But they can run us down in the open, too, you know.”
If Heydrich made it back to his underground headquarters, he didn’t plan on coming out again any time soon. In the meanwhile…“As long as we’re above the ground and moving, we’ve got a chance to get away. I think the risk that they can follow us to the bunker and dig us out is just too big.”
Had Klein argued, he might have convinced his superior to change his mind. As things were, the Oberscharfuhrer only sighed. “Well, you’re right about one thing, boss-we can get screwed either way.”
They weren’t screwed yet. The Americans made a ham-fisted job of going after a pair of fugitives. Without false modesty, Heydrich knew the SS would have caught up with him and Klein in short order. For that matter, so would the NKVD. Professionals knew what they were doing. The Americans…
How the devil did they win? They were brave-Heydrich couldn’t deny that. And there were lots of them. And what came out of their factories…Few Germans had imagined just how much the USA could make when it set its mind to it. Bombers, fighters, tanks, jeeps, trucks…Yes, each man from the Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS was better than his enemy counterpart. But he wasn’t enough better, not when the other side had so many more troops and so much materiel.
And, however clumsy the other side was, it hadn’t given up here. American soldiers stumbled across the landscape. How far south and east the search extended, Heydrich didn’t want to think. Sooner or later, the Amis were much too likely to blunder across him and Klein by sheer luck. If they did…
If they do, I’m a dead man, Heydrich thought. So was Klein, but Hans could do his own worrying. If the noncom did, it stretched no further than himself. Heydrich also worried about the fate of the whole National Socialist uprising. It would go on without him; he knew that. Whether it would go on so well and sting the enemies from the east and west the way it had was a different question. Yes, Jochen Peiper was capable-he wouldn’t have been second in command if he weren’t. Still, Heydrich didn’t think anybody could match Heydrich.
“What are you idiots doing screwing around in this swamp?” The question came in such a broad Bavarian dialect that Heydrich barely understood it.
He almost plugged the man who asked it any which way. He’d had no idea anybody but Hans was anywhere within half a kilometer. But this wizened little grinning bastard appeared from behind a tussock as if he were a sprite in one of Wagner’s lesser operas. Now, was he a good sprite or the other kind? He was a sprite who was wary of firearms, that was for sure-he stood very still and kept his hands where Heydrich could see them.
“Hey, buddy, you don’t want to do that,” he said, his grin slipping only a little. “You shoot me, all the American pigdogs’ll come running this way.”
“Are you loyal to the Grossdeutsches Reich?” Heydrich demanded. He knew about the ever-rising price on his head. If this scrawny son of a bitch decided to play Judas, he’d get a lot more than thirty pieces of silver. But he won’t live to enjoy them if he does, the Reichsprotektor promised himself.
“Got out of the Ukraine in one piece. Got out of Romania in one piece. Hell, got out of Hungary almost in one piece-they grazed me while I was hightailing it over the border. Got stuck in Vienna after that, and got away there, too,” the Bavarian said. “We still owe folks a thing or three.”
Maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe he was spinning a line to lull Heydrich and Klein. The underofficer came straight to the point: “Can you get us out of here without tipping off the Amis?”
“Not a sure-fire deal, but I think so,” the Bavarian answered. “Want to come along and see?”